Summary: Checking and Measuring the Architectural
Structural Conformance of Object-Oriented
Systems
Marwan Abi-Antoun Jonathan Aldrich
December 2007
CMU-ISRI-07-119
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Abstract
The benefits of architectural analyses are only achieved if one can guarantee that the implementation con-
forms to the architecture. We propose an approach for checking and measuring the structural conformance
of a software system's implementation to its execution architecture.
In contrast to existing approaches, our approach uses static analyses, and works with existing Java-like pro-
gramming languages, existing object-oriented designs and existing integrated development environments.
We address the problem with a multi-pronged approach, as follows: (a) express and enforce architectural
intent related to object encapsulation and communication directly in code using ownership domain anno-
tations; (b) extract a sound execution architecture from the annotated program semi-automatically; and
(c) compare the as-built extracted architecture to the as-designed architecture semi-automatically; and (d)
obtain a measure of conformance.